1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information filtering apparatus for selecting articles from a great quantity of text articles that are required by a user or that meet requirements and interests of the user so as to periodically present the selected articles to the user, and a method therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, wide use of word processors and computers and that of electronic mail and electronic news through computer networks has resulted in electronic documents being spread rapidly.
As can be understood from the term "electronic publication", it can be considered that presentation of information of the contents of newspapers, magazines and books will be given generally. As a result, an expectation can be performed that the quantity of text information that is available in real time for persons is enlarged.
Therefore, there has arisen a requirement for an information filtering system or an information filtering service for selecting a text article from a great quantity of text articles of newspaper and magazines that meets requirements and interests of a user to periodically present the selected article to the user.
Conventional information filtering systems have been arranged to retrieve articles that meet a user profile expressing requirements and interests of a user and to give a presentation of the overall body of the articles while lining up the articles.
Generally, the user profile contained a plurality of topics in which a user is interested in.
Moreover, a function called "Relevance Feedback" has been realized with which the availability of the presented article is determined by a user and information about the determination is reflected onto the user profile to improve the adaptability in the ensuing information filtering operations.
However, the conventional systems, having the simple structure such that the selected articles are enumerated so as to be presented to the user, has a problem in that the user cannot easily recognize the relationship between the articles presented this time and those which have previously been presented.
Moreover, the simple presentation of articles performed by the conventional systems lacks information about the topic and the retrieval conditions of the topic with which matching has been made and which has thus caused the article to be presented to the user and information about the method of other users to read the presented article. Therefore, a great labor has been required to determine the availability of the article and consistency cannot easily be maintained.
It is effective for the information filtering system to perform double filtering such that an important article is selected and then an important text in the article is partially selected in view of effectively collecting information from a long article. However, since the conventional system has the structure such that a text having an appropriate length has been mechanically extracted, there arises a problem in that unnecessary information is sometimes included or required information is lacking.
Since the conventional system has the simple structure such that a text to be presented to the user is selected in accordance with similarity of the text supplied from a news source and the retrieval condition, texts even having the same contents are supplied in a disordered manner.
The information filtering system of the foregoing type has been structured under condition that all articles to be supplied from a news source are written in a single language (for example, English) and the system has been designed to be used in only the subject language zone. Therefore, articles obtained from a news source in another language zone cannot be mixed and supplied to the user.
To provide a news source having articles supplied in a certain language zone and a news source having articles in another language zone are mixed and supplied to a user, a system having a structure such that information filtering apparatuses respectively realized in the subject languages are provided individually are insufficient. If the information filtering apparatuses are provided individually, the user is required to set retrieval conditions for each information filtering apparatus. Moreover, articles written in different languages but having the same contents sometimes coexist. Therefore, the system simply having individual information filtering apparatuses encounters a problem in that duplicate articles are supplied to a user.
An object of the present invention is to provide an information filtering apparatus capable of giving a presentation of the relevance of articles to be supplied to a user by information filtering and enabling the user to recognize the relevance of the articles, and to a method therefor.